Historically, tuner demodulators (“tuner cans”) for video band applications have been implemented entirely in the analog domain, using up to several hundred discrete components and consuming as much as two to three watts of power. Unfortunately, despite their low cost and robust performance, power and size considerations make discrete tuner cans unsuitable for a number of emerging video applications, such as analog video reception on mobile telephones, personal digital assistants, laptop computers or other small portable devices.
To meet the demand for small, low-power tuners, designers have begun implementing tuners in silicon, in most cases with architectures that mimic the superheterodyne operation of discrete tuner cans; down-converting the carrier frequency of a desired channel to a fixed intermediate frequency (IF), then passing the IF signal through an image-rejection stage to filter spectral components at image frequencies. Unfortunately, the notoriously poor performance of integrated passives makes it difficult to achieve a satisfactory balance between image rejection and power consumption. Consequently existing silicon tuners typically exhibit either compromised performance at low power, or reasonable performance at high power.